Arc

“… & thus the place/ we occupy/ seems all the world.” ~ David Wojahn

Tonight I rinse the dishes and the cutlery
with which I’ve fed my living and my dead
(their spirits hovering on the rims of orange

plastic until I shelve them in the cupboard)—
While I work, I listen as a famous poet reads
on TV a litany of names and how they paper

the walls in the dim warehouse of memory—
And I think, as many as there are names, there are
poems and days, and tasks that will not end.

Fragments flutter out of the sky, down from the trees,
which we are left to gather or to count. They’re far
too many, the task so formidable— often, the only

respite: on that hinge that swings the door of days.

In response to small stone (147).